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| ▲ | CharlieDigital 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're a content creator; you define your revenue stream. Uber engineers do not define their revenue stream; the product leadership team does. $1500/mo of AI spend by engineers does not equate to revenue. They need to figure out revenue first before zeroing in on AI spend. | | |
| ▲ | Daishiman 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | $18K a year is a fraction of the salary of a junior engineer. Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI. | | |
| ▲ | fg137 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | In the old world, the refactor probably won't happen in the first place, but the effort would be put elsewhere. "Increased velocity of ..
greenfield features" doesn't directly translate to additional revenue, and your number is very questionable in the first place. Software engineers like to talk as if business and finance are as easy as pushing code out and refactoring. It's not and never has been. | |
| ▲ | jg0r3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | $18k a year is near half of my salary as junior verging on senior developer in the conservation field. Not everyone works in FAANG. | |
| ▲ | analognoise 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t try to fix auto-generated code: because you just regenerate it. The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”. | | |
| ▲ | Marsymars 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of instances of a thing that needs to be updated in a predictable way, but is complicated enough that it's going to be faster for me to manually update hundreds of instances rather than writing a generalizable find/replace tool. | |
| ▲ | Daishiman 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). Absolutely false. Refactors (in my case) can be as simple as dropping old packages for newer packages with slightly different semantics. It can be moving legacy pages from jQuery to Vue. > You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. I've 25 years coding, trust me, I don't lose anything by not finding out on my own that the semantics of a jQuery promise changed between major versions. > The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”. You have no idea of what you're talking about. There are entire classes of K8s networking issues that would have taken me a day to debug which Claude solved in minutes just because it can run 20 diagnostics commands in two minutes and deal with technical minutae that is time-consuming but ultimately irrelevant to my business goals. |
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| ▲ | ofjcihen 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you share some examples that you would say justify that price? Not a gotcha, I’m genuinely curious where you’re seeing a return at that level. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've written tens of thousands of lines of tested, working code that I would not have written otherwise, and that code is useful to me. I effectively get to operate at the rate of a small team of engineers - I know that because I've managed small teams of engineers in the past. | | |
| ▲ | ofjcihen 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > that I would not have written otherwise I think this is the part I struggle with. The code I write makes me money or is a way of teaching me something, both of which are reasons that I would write the code regardless. I don’t think I have any projects in mind that I’d be willing to spend half of a car on that I also wouldn’t have written myself. Obviously just a personal take though. I’m glad you get the usage you want out of it. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | My "job" is building open source software for data journalism (and anyone else who needs the tools data journalists need, which is pretty much everyone else). I can build more of those tools, and better, in exchange for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire a team to help. |
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| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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